Securities are often traded based on news items and market sentiment relating to the news items. For example, some hedge funds and brokerage houses currently use automated algorithmic trading models that process such news items and market sentiment. Progress Software Corporation offers a tool, under the trade name Progress® Apama®, that is a platform upon which a user builds his own event-driven trading algorithms. The user may add various data feeds, including news feeds.
Both Dow Jones and Reuters offer XML-based low-latency (high-speed) news feed services that are currently being used by hedge funds and investment banks for their algorithmic trading. Some news feed services, like those of Dow Jones and Ravenpack, offer market sentiment indicators. Reuters and Infonic, formerly Corpora, offer a software product for measuring sentiment based on a data feed.
In considering the merits and risks of a prospective trade, it is often useful to compare the prospective trade to other possible trades in comparable markets and/or at comparable times. Therefore, when an algorithm-based trading system provides a recommendation for a trade, it would be useful, before acting on the recommendation, to compare the recommendation to other trading recommendations that have been, or are concurrently being, presented. Known algorithm-based trading systems and services typically do not provide users with tools for identifying or considering such other comparable trading recommendations.
It would be desirable, therefore, to provide apparatus and methods for analyzing trading recommendations.